I’m Standing Right Here

He told Megan on Thursday night.

They were in the kitchen. She was at the counter slicing a lime for her water—a leftover habit from the life where they bought limes for cocktails instead of hydration—and he was leaning against the fridge with his arms crossed. Watching her. The way he always did when he had something to pitch: relaxed, confident, already halfway to the close.

“So Vince—the neighbor, three doors down—he runs this card game on Fridays.”

Megan didn’t look up. “The scary one?”

“He’s not scary. He’s just—” Tyler searched for the word. “Scruffy.”

“He stares at me when I run.”

“Everyone stares at you when you run.”

“He does it from a lawn chair.”

“Yeah, he’s a little—look, he’s rough around the edges. But he’s got this poker game. Some older guys, friends of his. They’ve got money, they can’t play cards, and they show up every Friday and lose a thousand bucks between them.” He paused. “He wants me to play.”

She looked up now. The lime knife paused. “You want to play poker at that man’s house.”

“I want to win poker at that man’s house. There’s a difference.” He smiled. She didn’t. “Meg. I’m good at cards. You know I’m good at cards. These guys are amateurs with cash—Vince basically said as much. I sit down for three hours, I walk out with a grand. Maybe more.”

“And?”

She knew there was an and. Eight years. She could read the sequence of his pitch the way he could read a blueprint.

“And he mentioned it would help if you came. Poured drinks. These guys play worse when there’s a woman in the room, apparently, and you’re—” He gestured vaguely at all of her. “You know.”

“I know what?”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Say it.”

“You’re hott, Megan. You walk into a room and men forget how to count. You pour drinks, they stare, I take their money.”

His eyes dropped to her chest when he said it. He couldn’t help it—and the memory that followed was immediate. The farmer’s market last September. She’d thrown on a white t-shirt, no bra—hadn’t thought about it, had been lounging around the apartment all morning. Ten minutes in, Tyler noticed every man at the tomato stand had stopped pretending to shop. The guy behind the register was holding a bag and staring. The thin cotton hid nothing—the full shape of her tits visible, the raised profile of each puffy nipple pressing through the fabric—and the stand had gone quiet. Megan noticed at the same moment he did. Her face went scarlet. She crossed her arms so fast she nearly toppled a display of peaches and didn’t uncross them for the rest of the morning. She’d been silent in the car. She’d never left the house without a bra since. The mortification had been total—a woman who tucked in her shirts and crossed her ankles and did not, under any circumstances, put herself on display for strangers.

But Tyler remembered the silence at that tomato stand. He remembered what her body did to a room without even trying.

“So I’m the distraction.”

“You’re the weapon.”

She set the knife down. Crossed her arms—the default posture when she was thinking, which pushed her breasts up against the neckline of her shirt and Tyler’s eyes went there for a half-second and came back.

“Who are these guys?”

“Some older dudes. Friends of Vince’s.”

“What kind of friends?”

“The kind who show up on Friday nights with cash and too much cologne.”

“Tyler.”

“I’m not going to lie to you and say they’re accountants. They’re Vince’s guys. A little rough probably. But that’s the whole point—rough guys, bad at cards, easy money.”

“And I’m just there to pour drinks.”

“And look gorgeous. Which you can’t help. So really you just have to pour drinks.”

She almost smiled. He saw it—the corner of her mouth twitching, the effort of maintaining the skepticism against the flattery and the number and the pitch. She was competitive. She was broke. And she was married to a man who could sell ice to Eskimos when the cause was urgent enough.

“How much?” she said.

He told her the number.

Something moved across her face that she couldn’t control—a flicker of recognition. The Visa minimum. The electric bill. Three weeks’ worth of breathing room. He saw her see it. He recognized it because the same thing had happened to him at the gas station.

The number was its own pitch.

“Three nights,” he said. “We knock out the Visa, stack some breathing room, and we’re done. These guys will never know what hit them.”

“If one of them puts a hand on me, we’re leaving.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m serious, Tyler.”

“So am I. One hand out of line and we walk. I’ll be right there the whole time.”

She held his gaze. He held hers.

The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. She picked up the lime knife.

“Fine. But I’m wearing what I want, I’m drinking their liquor, and if your scary neighbor friend calls me ‘sweetheart,’ I’m charging double.”

He grinned.

She fought the smile and lost again, and when it broke through it was the real one—the warm, conspiratorial smile of a woman who was about to do something stupid with the man she loved.

“We’re going to crush them.”

“We’re going to destroy them.”

She pointed the knife at him. “If any of them have a hot tub, I’m leaving.”

He crossed the kitchen and kissed her, one hand on her hip, and she leaned into it. They were in this together. Partners in a con they were running on men they’d never met, and the feeling of it—the team dynamic, the us-against-them—was the first clean, uncomplicated thing they’d shared in months.

---

Friday came and Megan stood in front of the closet.

She pulled out the fitted jeans—dark wash, from the old life, the ones that cost two hundred dollars and still fit like they’d been poured on. A top. Something appropriate. The white one from Nordstrom—fitted, clean neckline, thin fabric. She held it against herself in the mirror. It said *bar on a Saturday*, not *I dressed up for you*. Right.

She laid the jeans on the bed and stepped out of her sweatpants. Her legs were bare and long, the muscles from years of running visible in the warm light of the bedroom. She unhooked the stretched-out cotton bra she’d been wearing around the house and reached for the good one. White. Underwire. The one that took her breasts and organized them into something manageable—shape instead of spectacle. She put it on and felt the wire settle under each breast, the cups lifting and compressing, the band snug against her ribs. Her tits filled the cups to the edge—the top curve of each breast swelling above the lace trim, the kind of fit that a salesperson would call *supportive* and that every man who saw the result would call something else. She adjusted the straps. Checked the mirror. The bra did its job: contained, shaped, controlled.

She pulled on the jeans. The dark denim slid up her legs and caught at her thighs where it always caught—the shimmy she’d been doing since high school, working the fabric over her hips, tugging the waistband into place and buttoning. The jeans fit the way expensive jeans fit a body like hers: tight through the thigh and ass, sitting on her hips in a way that outlined everything underneath. She pulled the white top on over the bra. Smoothed it down. The neckline was modest. The fabric showed shape but no detail.

She looked at herself. A woman you’d notice. A woman you’d buy a drink for. Not a woman putting on a show.

She nodded at the mirror. Fine.

Tyler appeared in the bedroom doorway. She caught him in the mirror—his eyes moving from her legs to her waist to the place where the top met her chest.

“You look great,” he said. He leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his head tilted and the expression on his face was the one he wore when he was about to talk her into something. “But you look like you’re going to brunch.”

“I’m going to a card game at our neighbor’s house. Brunch would be an upgrade.”

“These guys are supposed to lose their minds, Meg. That’s the play. You walk in looking like you’re meeting your mother for lunch, they’re going to play normal poker.” He pushed off the doorframe and walked to the closet. She watched him in the mirror, one eyebrow raised. He reached past her work blouses and pulled out the denim shorts—the short ones, cutoff, frayed at the hem, the pair she wore to the beach and around the house on weekends and absolutely nowhere else. He held them up.

“No.”

“And this.” He reached to the shelf and pulled down a ribbed white tank top—thin, fitted, the kind that clung to everything it touched.

“Tyler. No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll look like I’m—” She stopped. Her mouth pressed into a thin line, the same line it pressed into when someone used the wrong fork or said something vulgar at a dinner party. “Those shorts barely cover anything.”

“That’s the point. These guys need to be distracted, not mildly interested. You wear this, they won’t be able to hold their cards.”

She looked at the shorts in his hand. The tank top. Then at her own reflection—the tasteful jeans, the Nordstrom top, the put-together woman who wouldn’t turn a single head in this outfit that she hadn’t already turned a thousand times.

Tyler’s confidence was irritating because it was contagious. He had the look he got when he was certain—the half-smile, the easy posture, the absolute sureness that he’d already figured out the room and everyone in it. He held out the shorts.

“Trust me. We walk out with double.”

She took the shorts from his hand.

She turned her back to him and stripped off the jeans—the denim peeling down her legs, stepping out one foot at a time. She stood in the bra and her underwear, bare legs, and pulled on the shorts. They were soft from a hundred washes and short enough that the pocket lining would peek below the hem if she moved wrong. She buttoned them. The frayed edge sat high on her thighs—four inches above the knee at least, the pale skin of her upper legs bare, the curve of her ass visible at the hem when she shifted her weight. The denim was tight. It hugged her hips and her ass in a way that the dark-wash jeans had only hinted at.

She pulled off the Nordstrom top and dropped it on the bed. Picked up the ribbed tank. Pulled it on over her head and felt it slide down her body and catch on every contour—the bra, the shape of each breast inside it, the dip of her waist, the flat plane of her stomach. The ribbed cotton was thin and the white was bright and the bra underneath was visible through the fabric—the outline of the cups, the faint shadow of the straps at her shoulders. The tank ended just above the waistband of the shorts. A strip of bare skin showed between the hem and the denim.

She looked at herself in the full-length mirror and her stomach turned over.

The woman looking back was not the woman who had been standing there two minutes ago. The shorts showed everything the jeans had hidden—the full length of her legs, the toned thighs, the way the frayed denim barely covered her ass and pulled tight across her hips. The tank was worse. The ribbed fabric clung to her bra and caught the shape of her breasts with a specificity that made *shape* an understatement—the full, round weight of each one visible through the cotton, the line where the underwire ended and the soft upper curve began, the faint shadow of her nipples through the double layer of fabric. Her waist looked narrow between the flare of her hips and the width of her chest. The strip of bare stomach between the tank and the shorts was flat and pale and drew the eye straight to the waistband sitting low on her hips.

She looked like a woman men would do stupid things for. She looked like a woman who was asking them to.

Her reflection stared back and she felt the old unease rise through her chest—the discomfort she’d carried since sixteen, since she’d first understood what her body did to rooms she walked into. She didn’t dress like this. Not for strangers. Not for men she didn’t know in a house she didn’t trust. The woman in the mirror looked available, exposed, like she was advertising something she had no intention of selling.

She reached for the jeans.

“Meg.” Tyler was behind her. His hands landed on her shoulders—warm, steady. He met her eyes in the mirror. “You look incredible. That’s the whole play. They look at you and they can’t think. Three hours and we’re done.”

“I look like I’m trying to get groped, Tyler.”

“You look like a woman who’s going to take a thousand dollars off a table full of idiots.” He squeezed her shoulders. The confidence again—total, uncomplicated, the certainty of a man who believed he had already solved the room. “We need this.”

The words sat between them. *We need this.* The Visa bill. The debt notice in the drawer she wasn’t supposed to know about but did. The nine-hundred-dollar rent on a duplex that was the cheapest thing in the zip code. She looked at herself in the mirror. The tank top pulling across her chest. The shorts that were barely shorts. Her breasts, which had been drawing attention she didn’t want since she was fourteen, doing exactly what they always did in a top like this.

She exhaled. Straightened her spine. Lifted her chin—the posture, the armor, the reflex she’d been putting on since she was old enough to understand that men were going to stare whether she asked them to or not.

“Fine.” She smoothed the tank over her stomach. Turned sideways, checked the mirror, tugged the shorts down a quarter inch. “But if one of them calls me ‘sweetheart,’ I’m adding a surcharge.”

Hair down. She pulled the elastic free and her dark hair fell past her shoulders—thick, heavy, the contrast of the nearly-black waves against the white tank and her pale skin sharp enough to stop a conversation. She ran her fingers through it, shook it out. Touched up her mascara. A light gloss on her lips—nothing that looked like effort. Perfume at her wrists and her neck—the good one, the French scent that cost more per ounce than the wine they’d been drinking, warm and floral and entirely wrong for where she was going. The shampoo underneath it. She smelled like clean hair and good decisions and a life she wasn’t living anymore.

She looked at herself one last time. The shorts. The tank clinging to the bra, the shape of her tits visible through the ribbed cotton. The bare legs. The dark hair against the white fabric. The pale blue eyes that held her own gaze in the glass without flinching.

She could do this. She’d bartended worse rooms. She’d handled worse men. Three hours, and she’d be home and in the shower and these shorts would be in the hamper and she’d never wear them for anyone but Tyler again.

“Ready?” he asked from the doorway.

Her reflection didn’t look ready. Her reflection looked like a woman walking into something she couldn’t undo.

“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”

---

They walked to Vince’s house. Three doors down, opposite side of the street.

Ninety seconds of sidewalk and the longest transition of the evening.

The streetlights were just coming on. The block was settling into its Friday sounds—a television through a screen door, somebody’s charcoal grill sending up smoke two houses down, the distant bass of a car stereo thumping from the cross street. The air was warm and smelled like cut grass and lighter fluid and the exhaust of a truck that had idled too long.

Tyler’s hand found the small of her back as they walked. An unconscious gesture, the automatic proprietary touch that was their shorthand for *I’m here.* She felt his palm through the fabric of her top and the warmth of it steadied something in her chest.

She could feel the new calluses through the cotton.

Vince’s house got closer and the details sharpened. The dead lawn. The oil stain on the driveway shaped like a dark continent. The open garage with its shadows and its mess.

The house was lit from inside—yellow light through curtained windows, figures already moving. Music, faint, something with a bass line. Cigarette smoke carrying from the direction of the porch.

She could feel it—the wrongness of the setting, the gap between who she was and where she was going. Her perfume against the charcoal smoke. Her hundred-dollar cutoffs and her ribbed tank on this sidewalk. The French shampoo and the six-dollar wine and the duplex with window boxes on a block where the nicest landscaping was an empty above-ground pool.

“This is going to be terrible,” she said.

“It’s going to be easy,” he said. “I’m going to take these guys apart.”

She almost smiled.

They reached the porch. Tyler squeezed her hand once, quickly, and then his hand dropped because they were here and the door was in front of them and the evening was about to begin.

Vince opened the door.

---

Megan stepped inside and the smell found her first — old cigarettes saturated into every surface, layered with fried food and something underneath both, something damp and biological that had stopped being fixable years ago. The smell of a house that had given up on itself.

Wood paneling on every wall, warped at the seams with humidity. Carpet that might have been beige twenty years ago and was now the color of a headache.

She saw the stain on the kitchen counter—brown, ring-shaped, wide as a dinner plate. She saw the paneling buckle near the floor where moisture had been winning a long war.

Her mouth tightened. She didn’t wrinkle her nose. She wanted to.

Vince stood in the doorway. He wore a dark button-down that was open one button too many, revealing the gold chain resting against a thatch of dark chest hair. The slicked-back hair caught the overhead light with a greasy shine. The stubble. The deep-set eyes. He looked at her—face first, then down, slowly, to her chest, where his gaze settled for a full beat before continuing to her legs and back up—and the look wasn’t subtle. He didn’t pretend he wasn’t doing it. The appraisal was patient, specific, proprietary, as if he was confirming something he already knew.

“Hey. Come in, come in.” His voice was lower than she’d expected, or maybe just closer. Direct, no preamble.

He shook Tyler’s hand—a grip that looked firm and brief. He didn’t shake Megan’s. He put a hand on her upper arm, his rough fingers wrapping briefly around the muscle, too familiar for a first real interaction. The touch lasted a second. He let go and stepped aside and the smell of him—cigarettes, a musk that was close and heavy, something greasy that might have been hair product or cologne or just Vince—replaced the house smell for a moment before the house reclaimed the air.

The interior tour took thirty seconds. Living room: sagging couch, a recliner with duct tape on the arm, a TV on a stand that looked like it had been assembled wrong. Kitchen: the stained counter, a Mr. Coffee maker with a cracked carafe, a dog bowl by the back door but no dog. On the wall near the kitchen, a framed photograph of an older woman—heavyset, dark hair, the same deep-set eyes as Vince. His mother. The house had been hers.

The poker table stood in the center of the living room, the couch pushed against the wall to make space. Folding legs, green felt top, six mismatched chairs pulled around it. Chips in a plastic carousel. Cards still in the cellophane. Against the far wall, the bar setup: a card table with bottles—mid-shelf bourbon, gin, vodka, a handle of rum—a cooler full of ice from a gas station bag, a sleeve of red Solo cups.

Megan assessed the bar. She’d served worse in basements in college where the bottles were plastic and the ice was optional. At least these were glass. At least there was actual ice.

She was wrong here. Not wrong the way a misplaced object is wrong — wrong the way a living thing is wrong in a dead room. The straight spine, the ankles crossed where she stood, the chin that stayed level even as her eyes catalogued every stain and buckle and accumulated failure of the space. She held herself the way she always held herself — poised, composed, the unconscious inheritance of a woman who grew up where the furniture matched and adults spoke in complete sentences — and in Vince’s living room that composure was an announcement. It broadcast in every direction at once: *I do not belong here.* The posture alone was enough. Add the face, the body, the dark hair falling past her shoulders, and she wasn’t just wrong for the room. She was an insult to it. A woman men would put on a pedestal, marooned in a room where the carpet couldn’t remember its original color.

And the men would feel it. She could already see it forming — the way Vince’s gaze had lingered, patient and proprietary, the way the room seemed to reorganize itself around her presence. A woman like her in a place like this wasn’t just beautiful. She was a provocation.

Before the other men arrived, Vince settled into the best chair at the poker table—the one at the head with a clear sightline to the bar, to the door, to everywhere Megan would be standing for the next four hours. He sat the way men like him sat: spread, weight centered, as if the furniture existed to hold specifically him.

“Look,” he said. “These guys are gonna look. That’s the whole point, right? They look at her, they can’t think straight, you clean up.” He directed this at Tyler but his eyes slid to Megan and stayed. “If anything gets out of hand—anything—you give me a signal. You need a word. Something you can say out loud that doesn’t sound like a signal. Something the bartender would say.”

Megan thought for a second. “‘Last call.’”

Vince pointed at her. “That’s it. You say ‘last call,’ I shut it down. Wrap the game, clear the room, everybody goes home. They won’t even know it was you.” He looked at Tyler. “Either of you can say it. But it won’t come to that.”

Tyler nodded. Megan nodded.

He let that land. The room was quiet for a moment. Then the pivot, and his voice dropped half a step—still casual, but closer, man-to-man, the tone of a partner letting his crew in on the real play.

“But just… go with it a little. Whatever makes ’em feel good. You’ll know where the line is—that’s what the signal’s for.”

“Go with what, exactly?” Megan asked.

Vince met her eyes. The look was steady, unbothered. “The attention. The comments. These guys are gonna tell you you’re the best-looking woman they’ve ever seen, because you probably are, and they’re gonna be loud about it. Let ’em. It’s part of the play. The more they think they’ve got a chance, the worse they play. That’s the hustle.”

Megan said nothing. Tyler said nothing.

“One more thing.” Vince leaned forward, elbows on the felt. “Don’t let on that you two are together.”

Tyler frowned. “What?”

“These guys’ll play different if they think she’s somebody’s wife. They’ll hold back, get careful. We want ’em loose. So tonight, she’s just… Megan. She’s here because I asked her. You’re here because you play cards. You don’t know each other.”

“We walked here together,” Megan said. “From three houses down.”

“And they don’t know that.” Vince shrugged. “Easy.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. But she was smiling—the edge of a laugh breaking through.

Tyler was looking at her hand. Her left hand, resting on the back of the chair. The ring.

“Meg.” He nodded at it.

She looked down. The band caught the overhead light—thin, white gold, the one he’d slid onto her finger three years ago in a garden with sixty people watching. She understood before he said it.

“Right.” She twisted it off. The metal slid easy—her fingers were warm—and her hand felt bare and wrong without it. She held it for a second, then slipped it into the front pocket of her shorts.

Vince watched them agree. His face showed nothing. His hand went to his slicked-back hair and ran through it once, and when it came away his palm had a shine.

The doorbell rang.

---

Wicks came through the door talking.

“Vince! Where’s this girl, man? Where’s the—oh.”

He stopped in the living room doorway.

He was smaller than Megan expected. Thin, wiry, vibrating with a restless energy that entered the room a full step before he did. Bad denim—jeans that sagged at the knee and a jacket he didn’t need in June. Sharp features, a jawline that might have been something twenty years and a thousand cigarettes ago. Bad teeth—yellowed, one chipped, the canine on the right side dark with decay.

Watery blue eyes that were already moving, scanning, unable to land on anything for more than a second until they landed on Megan and locked.

“Holy shit.” He said it to the room, not to her. His voice was nasal and too loud. “Vince, you didn’t tell me she was *this* hot.”

No handshake. No *nice to meet you*. No small talk. She was the event. Wicks had declared it.

Dale entered behind him.

Dale came in behind him, and the doorway shrank.

He was an enormous black man. Six-two, two-fifty, broad across the chest and neck and shoulders — a body built by twenty years of hauling freight, never a gym, the mass distributed across a frame that made the room’s dimensions feel like a miscalculation. His skin was deep, rich dark — the unbroken black-brown of polished wood catching the overhead light. Close-cropped grey hair sat tight against his dark scalp. A heavy face: wide nose, full mouth, a jaw that carried hard bone beneath the softening of age. Heavy-lidded eyes that gave him the look of a man half-asleep, except he was watching everything. A gold chain — thicker than Vince’s, real — sat in the crease of a neck wider than Megan’s thigh.

He didn’t rush. He moved through the room the way a man moves through a room that belongs to him regardless of whose name is on the deed. He set a bottle on the counter — whiskey, better than anything Vince had — and turned to look at Megan.

The look. He didn’t comment. He didn’t narrate. He looked at her chest — patient, direct, his dark eyes holding without blinking, without pretending it was anything else — then raised them to her face with the same certainty.

“Megan.” His voice was deep and chest-deep, a low rumble she felt in the floorboards. Not a question. Not a greeting, exactly. He said her name the way a man says the name of something he’s been told about and is now confirming exists.

The weight of his attention was physical. She could feel it settle on her the way you feel a change in air pressure. She held his eye contact. She was the one who broke it — looked down at his hand on the whiskey bottle, the dark forearm thick with veins, old scars faded white against that deep skin. When she glanced back, something in his expression had settled. Satisfied. Confirmed.

He extended his hand. It engulfed hers — large, warm, dry, dark against her pale fingers — and his grip was certain. He held for a beat longer than necessary. Up close the smell of him was dense: cigar smoke, the stale residue of cheap cigars clinging to his clothes, his skin, his breath, layered with a warm cologne that was the only evidence any of these men had tried. The combination filled whatever space he occupied and pushed outward.

“Vince undersold you,” Dale said. The voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “Considerably.”

Wicks shook her hand. Clammy, eager, too many small bones.

His fingers were stained yellow at the tips—nicotine that didn’t wash out.

“Vince, where’d you find her?” Wicks was already talking to the room, not to her. “God damn. Look at her. Look at —” He gestured at all of Megan with both hands, a frantic up-and-down sweep. “Are you serious right now?”

“I’m standing right here,” Megan said. Cool. Level. The voice she used on contractors who tracked mud on her floor.

Wicks blinked. His grin faltered for half a second — the briefest recalibration of a man who’d forgotten the object of his monologue could hear him. “Oh — hey, no, I’m — that’s a compliment. That’s all that is.” He put both hands up, palms out, a mock surrender that didn’t reach his eyes. “My bad. I just — you’re gorgeous. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Thank you.” Flat. The two words were a door closing.

Wicks looked at Dale for backup. Dale was already seated — he’d taken the chair at the far end without asking, the biggest seat, his mass settling into it the way water fills a container. He didn’t help Wicks. He lit his cigar, the Zippo clicking open and shut, and watched Megan through the first curl of smoke.

“Sit down, Wicks,” Dale said. Low. Not a suggestion.

Wicks sat.

Vince, from the head of the table, smiled at Megan — the smile that was supposed to be reassuring. “Don’t mind him. He talks before he thinks. You good? Bourbon’s on the left.”

“I’m good.” She met his eyes and held them and her chin was level and her posture was perfect. She was not going to flinch for these men. Not for the skinny twitching one and not for the enormous one watching her through cigar smoke and not for Vince with his greasy patience.

But underneath the composure, a current ran. She had never been this close — this *available* — to men like this. Not in college behind a bar with bouncers at the door and forty other women in the room. Not passing them on a sidewalk with distance and daylight and somewhere else to be. Here there were no bouncers. No other women. No distance. Four men, one woman, a locked door behind her and an evening stretching ahead, and they were looking at her the way men look at something they believe they’ve been given access to. The hunger was visible. Wicks wore it like a billboard. Dale wore it like a uniform. Even Vince — casual, proprietary — wore it beneath the host’s smile.

She had poured drinks for men who wanted her a hundred times. She’d never poured them in a room where the wanting had no walls.

Tyler sat at the poker table. His jaw was set. He picked up a chip and turned it between his fingers. He was nobody to them — just some card player Vince had invited, unconnected to the woman behind the bar.

Megan stepped behind the bar table and picked up the bourbon. “What’s everyone drinking?”

She was working. She was the bartender. She could do this.

----
Associated video: https://www.redgifs.com/watch/outrageousoffbeatindochinesetiger

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